Kinder Scout is the highest and wildest plateau in the Peak District, a place better known today for its role in the 1932 mass trespass than for folklore, but the moor still carries at least one properly strange piece of local legend: Mermaid's Pool, a small body of water on the plateau that never quite loses its dark, almost black colouring even in bright weather, most likely the result of peat staining the water rather than any unusual depth.
Tradition holds that a mermaid lives in the pool and comes to the surface once a year, on Easter Eve, to look over anyone who visits. Those she favours are said to be granted immortality, or in some tellings simply eternal youth, while anyone she takes against is dragged beneath the surface and drowned. It is a story with the shape of much older water-spirit folklore found across Britain, warning people away from a genuinely isolated and exposed stretch of moorland where a fall into cold water, far from help, would have been a real danger long before any mermaid was blamed for it.
The legend has never developed the kind of documented sighting history that some of the county's ghost stories have, and it survives mainly as a piece of oral tradition repeated by walking guides and local folklore writers rather than a recorded incident with named witnesses. It belongs here as exactly that: a genuine, long-standing piece of Peak District folklore rather than a modern invention, honestly presented without pretending it has more substance than it does.
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